Free Republic

Elf Aquitaine, until its privatisation in 1994, was much more than a oil company - according to prosecutors at the trial of Elf's top managers. They claim the state-owned firm worked as an unofficial arm of France's murkiest diplomacy. The close relationship between Elf and French officials is well-documented, and goes back to the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle. As the company expanded into Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, Elf paid secret "commissions" to African officials with the blessing of French governments. By the 1980s Elf had operations in Gabon, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon, Angola and Nigeria - which,...

Castro's (unregistered) agents-of-influence are frantically busy this week thanks to their (unregistered) accomplices in the Fake News Media. All claim an earth-shaking "transition" is underway in Cuba! Needless to add, according to these (unregistered) foreign agents, President Trump should promptly avail himself of this golden opportunity to embrace those harmless, innocent, free- health-care providers that U.S. policy has unjustly and vicariously “bullied” for ‘lo so many years. Could anything be more transparently facetious and idiotic? To quote the late Joan Rivers: “Can we talk?” In fact, what’s happening as Cuban “President” (dictator) Raul Castro “steps down” in favor of Cuban...

Buckets of blood dripped from Ebrahim Raisi, the 8th president of Iran, for his roles on the “Death Committee” and other atrocities under his direction. He wore a black turban to claim that he descended from the Prophet Muhammad. The Shiite president did not survive the helicopter crash of May 19, 2024. Who will mourn the death of an evil man who presided over the death and torture of so many? Dissidents were tortured, subjected to cruel inhuman treatment, and killed. A political purge against political dissidents lasted five months during 1988. Ordered by Ayatollah Khomeini, the “Death Committee” was...

Some U.S. lawmakers still take their jobs seriously, especially members of the House Committee on Homeland Security. You see, as a crowning component of his fetish for “normalizing” relations with (embracing and subsidizing) the Terror-Sponsoring Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate (called “Cuba” by Obama and his lapdog mainstream media) President Obama has given rapid and enthusiastic approval for six U.S. airlines to start flying one hundred direct flights a week from nine airports in Terror-Sponsoring Cuba to fifteen airports in our homeland.In light of this, some members of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security thought it prudent to check on what security measures...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...

We've come a long way from the 2003 British lectures about American obtrusive ray-bans and Kevlar losing what British soft hats and smiles had won. That quote about defeat from "a senior U.S. official" about the British withdrawal from southern Iraq is probably accurate, but it belongs to a larger, more disturbing context: (1) the popular British anger at the U.S. (whether evidenced by the "poodle" slur or the latest Pew poll finding that a bare majority of British subjects approves of the U.S.); (2) a growing acknowledgement of British weakness and appeasement, as exemplified not just by the escape...

Soon after the deadly Israeli attack that caused thousands of Hezbollah pagers to explode in September 2024, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government offered its assistance to Iran, the key sponsor of Hezbollah, considered a terrorist organization by the United States. “Our secret service has already contacted your services and we will share all the information we have gathered during the investigation,” Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto told his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, by telephone, according to a copy of a Hungarian government transcript of the Sept. 30 call obtained and authenticated by a Western intelligence service and reviewed by...

Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution Tuesday aimed at reopening the Strait of Hormuz, just hours before President Donald Trump’s deadline for Iran to cease threatening the key waterway.

Israel announced that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' intelligence chief Brig. Gen. Majid Khademi was killed in a precision strike, with an Israeli official noting that Quds Force’s special operations commander Asghar Bagheri was eliminated at the same time. In a statement posted on X, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed Khademi's killing, accusing him of helping advance terrorist attacks abroad and overseeing surveillance of Iranian civilians as part of the regime’s crackdown on domestic protests. "Khademi wasn’t just any figure, he was effectively No. 2 within the IRGC, one of the few senior commanders who managed to survive multiple...

Operation Epic Fury marks a turning point in the art of war. The key to 20th-century battles was air power. In the past, space and cyber activities have traditionally played supporting roles as so-called force multipliers. But this is no longer the case. In this conflict they have become mainstream, carving out new fronts for the wars of the future. The use of space is no longer something that is just nice to have, because everything from comms to intel to navigation uses space and cyber assets. Along with the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages US spy satellites, the US...

WASHINGTON, March 27 (Reuters) - Washington estimates up to 90 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq enter the country via Syria which has not acted to stop this flow of attackers, the U.S. State Department's Iraq adviser said on Tuesday. David Satterfield, who is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's key adviser on Iraq, said Syria had an obligation to stop "jihadists" crossing into Iraq where suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence. He estimated 90 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq were foreigners and while the mix of nationalities changed, some 85 to 90 percent of them crossed over from...

THE official notification, delivered in secure calls yesterday morning to senior Whitehall figures, was the latest dramatic behind-the-scenes move to get to grips with a crisis that is now engulfing the government. After a day of shadow-boxing with a notoriously slippery regime, Tony Blair is set to up the ante: the plight of the Shatt al-Arab 15 is officially a crisis and he will need the Cobra team to handle it. The clutch of VIPs will gather in an operations room several floors below Downing Street as early as this afternoon to plot an escape from a military spat that...

At 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, Ana Belen Montes, a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), walked into a public telephone booth outside Washington's National Zoo and made two calls to pager numbers later traced by federal agents to Cuba's Directorate of General Intelligence (DGI). She already had compromised the identities of CIA agents, revealed U.S. military secrets and exposed the contents of classified files. But, as Montes sent repeated signals to her DGI handlers during the days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the ...

The niece and grandniece of slain Iranian mastermind Gen. Qasem Soleimani were arrested by US officials, the State Department announced Saturday. Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter, who live a lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles, were nabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Friday as the US pushes to revoke green cards for foreign nationals with ties to Iran while locked in a war with the regime.

Liz Churchill @liz_churchill10·17m “Do they even belong in the European Union?!” SLOVAKIA JOINS HUNGARY IN THE EU REBELLION. Slovakia just went FULL FORCE against Zelensky’s Ukraine…calling them out for BLOWING UP Nord Stream and THREATENING anyone who opposes them. The GLOBALIST War Lords are COLLAPSING

It’s a good thing that the Biden administration corruptly shut down the Trump administration’s attempt to stop Communist China from spying on us, manipulating us and robbing us blind to avoid offending anyone… like Beijing. “We have heard concerns from the civil rights community that the “China Initiative” fueled a narrative of intolerance and bias. To many, that narrative suggests that the Justice Department treats people from China or of Chinese descent differently. The rise in anti-Asian hate crime and hate incidents only heightens these concerns.” Goodbye China Initiative and U.S. National Security. At least 154 Chinese scientists who worked...

Last week, Trump said that Russian President Vladimir Putin might be helping Iran "a bit". But Iran's successful hitting of US military bases and energy infrastructure in the Gulf suggests that Russian help is much more than what Trump described as "a bit". Russia is reported to have provided Iran with the precise locations of US warships and aircraft operating in the Middle East. Russia's Kanopus-V satellite gives Iran round-the-clock images of American assets and other targets in the region. An important target reportedly provided by Moscow to Tehran was the precise location of a US military base in Kuwait,...

Russia has been expanding its intelligence sharing and military cooperation with Iran, providing satellite imagery and improved drone technology to aid Tehran’s targeting of U.S. forces in the region, people familiar with the matter said. Russia is trying to keep its closest Middle Eastern partner in the fight against U.S. and Israeli military might and prolong a war that is benefiting Russia militarily and economically. The technology provided includes components of modified Shahed drones, which are meant to improve communication, navigation and targeting, the people said. Russia has also been drawing on its experience using drones in Ukraine, offering tactical...

IRAN’s new supreme tyrant has reportedly been flown to Moscow for leg surgery “personally offered by Putin” after suffering serious injuries during airstrikes.

“Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, succeeded his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, following his assassination on February 28, but a string of reports have said he has been in a coma following an airstrike with some observers, including President Donald Trump, suggesting he is dead. Khamenei is apparently unaware both that there is a war on and that he is the country's new leader. His injuries have required him to be flown to Russia for an operation 'personally offered by Putin', according to news outlet Al-Jarida.”